Clive Barker's Jericho

Unlike many squad-based shooters that don't require the use of the whole team, Jericho's premise relies on it. What's equally important is that each character is genuinely worth playing.

One of the best horror games to come out this fall, with horrifically imaginative creatures and dark, blood-covered environments.

A solid shooter marred by poor design. Excellent visuals and some fine FPS gameplay are to be had in Jericho, but I wouldn't pay full price for it.

The developers' love for detail, which is apparent in the characters of the Jericho team, is missing otherwise: the levels are linear and sometimes monotonous, the enemies always act the same way.

Jericho is definitely a case of inventive design married all-too-unhappily to old school thinking, and the result is a game that is almost fatally broken.

I guess I would recommend it to Clive Barker fans. Bear in mind that there are obvious drawbacks to it, too. If you can live with the abovementioned issues (mostly concerning the tedious elements in the level design and its appearance), you will find stuff that you can like in this one.

I can't promise you a perfect horror FPS in Jericho, in fact I can promise you that it won't be, but somewhere between the dense oppression of its atmosphere, the unapologetically, almost decadently horrific nature of its production design, the satisfaction of its gameplay when it's firing on all cylinders, and some rather broken protagonist characters who I was surprised to grow rather attached to by the end despite the script not making the most of their backstories, I find myself unable to write it off.

Utterly unremarkable. [Jan 2008, p.72]

Ironically, the story is better-suited to a summer Hollywood horror flick, and it falls flat as a premise for driving action in a video game. With a number of great releases on the horizon, there's no reason to let this aberration anywhere near your hard drive.

The action is quite a laugh and oddly refreshing. But it repeats and repeats and repeats. [Dec 2007, p.78]

Poor level design poisons Jericho's awesome but unrealized potential.

If the AI worked as it was intended, and if there was a cover system beyond "stand behind that pillar and the splash damage 'might' not kill you," Jericho would be great. But it doesn't, there isn't, and it's not. [Dec 2007, p.82]

If broken gameplay mechanics and community college acting didn’t weigh down the game, it might actually be worthwhile.

Jericho doesn't really bring anything new to the gaming world.

On one hand it's a near-broken video game, packed full of so many gaming no-nos that it ought never to be spoken about again, but on the other it's original, atmospheric and sickeningly good fun.

Jericho shows a great deal of thought put into the final product, but it just doesn’t rise above its own problems, unfortunately.

For fans of Clive Barker, Jericho could provide some degree of entertainment, and as we stated at the beginning of this review, it's not totally devoid of rewards. At the same time, it's difficult to recommend a game with so many lackluster elements in a world full of Gears of Wars and BioShocks (both of which managed to be scarier than Jericho).

The end result is just to routine to be scary. [Holiday 2007, p.84]

Instead of getting caught up in the struggle against a demonic force that threatens the continued existence of your race, you're left with tacked-on squad elements, poor friendly and enemy AI, repetitive encounters, and unabashedly linear levels. Jericho has a few memorable moments, but they're not worth the cash.

The sheer number of things that had to go wrong to keep Clive Barker’s Jericho from being a raging success is almost unbelievable, because when it comes right down to it, this game had the makings of a real hit. The fact that the credits roll at the exact same moment you finally find yourself on the edge of your seat cements the overall feeling of incompleteness the game gives off from the beginning.

The game's failure to monopolise on its squad dynamic relegates it to a shooter-by-numbers, and its appeal is then further undercut by the fact that, while Barker clearly has a sense for the grotesque, it is the only note that Jericho plays. [Dec 2007, p.91]

So what you have is by the numbers, lead you by the nose shooter with decent graphics, some neat special powers, and a crazy (but still kind of cool) Clive Barker story—that isn’t scary in the slightest. This is perhaps the game’s greatest failing: it’s just not scary.

Given how much repetition is in the game, one would think it was much longer than its six to eight hour length. The lack of any kind of multiplayer hurts it further. And the final stake to the heart is the appallingly abrupt and inconclusive ending.